As the Hindu guru Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj states in the spiritual classic I Am That:  “Get hold of the main thing:  That the world and the self are one and perfect.  Only your attitude is faulty and needs readjustment.”  A faulty attitude creates a faulty world – a world of insufficiency, in which human beings are reduced to the status of things.  It is a world of endless distractions, and “distractions from distraction,” where individuals feel like voids that need to be filled.  It is a world in which the present is devalued, and our hopes and dreams are projected on an empty future.

“Yaweh is not split, but is an antimony – a totality of inner opposites – and this is the indispensable condition for his tremendous dynamism,”  Jung realized.  Not only a benevolent helper, the god-image also represents the forces that oppose us, throwing obstacles in our path, surprising and humiliating us, inciting suffering to create intensified self-consciousness.  God, as a psychic fact, reveals himself in our neuroses, our allergies, our failed love affairs.  “God enters through the wound,” he wrote.

It is the difficult, but unavoidable, task of the modern individual to assimilate consciously all of the contents – from darkest degradation to profoundest purpose – contained in the psyche.

[Jesus in the Gospel of Thomas – shadow work]

“If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you.  If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”

Prophecy might be based, not on haphazard fantasy, but on attunement to subtler levels of reality – on forms of awareness that the modern West forfeited, temporarily, in order to develop empirical and rationalist thought.  As Armin Geertz, an anthropologist of the Hopi culture, writes:  “Prophecy is not prediction, even though it purports to be.  Prophecy is a thread in the total fabric of meaning, in the total worldview.  In this way it can be seen as a way of life and being.”

Writing in the early decades of the twentieth century, the German Jewish critic Walter Benjamin noted that modernity was causing an emptying-out of experience, as well as destroying the aura that had previously belonged to precious artworks and natural objects, giving them their unique presence.  “Less and less frequently do we encounter people with the ability to tell a tale properly.  More and more often there is embarrassment all around when the wish to hear a story is expressed,” he wrote in his essay “The Storyteller.”  “It is as if something that seemed inalienable to us, the securest among our possessions, were taken from us:  the ability to exchange experiences.”

Modernity unleashed a succession of shock effects, changing the nature of perception, as well as the individual’s relationship to his own personal history.  “Experience has fallen in value.  And it looks as if it is continuing to fall into bottomlessness.”  The old culture of contemplation gave way to the mass absorption in distractions.  The wise counsel embodied in the storyteller’s art was supplanted by the endless parade of statistics and information in the daily newspaper.  To enter the modern world, we forfeited our capacity for intimate exchanges requiring slowness and reciprocity and the play of the imagination.  “To perceive the aura of an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to look at us in return,” Benjamin wrote.  The value of perception and the meaning of personal history were degraded and denigrated to institute a mass society focused on abstractions, impelled by a “sense of the universal equality in all things.”

The visitors seem to be entities that sustain themselves from the negative emotions such as fear and anxiety, emanated by the human nervous system and energy body
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Chogyal Namkai Norbu writes in Dzogchen: The Self Perfected State:
Duality is the real root of our suffering and all our conflicts.  All our concepts and beliefs, no matter how profound they may seem, are like nets which trap us in dualism.  When we discover our limitations we have to try and overcome them, untying ourselves from whatever type of religious, political, or social conviction may condition us.  We have to abandon such concepts as “enlightenment,” “the nature of the mind,” and so on, until we no longer neglect to integrate our knowledge with our actual existence.
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Connected to our technological development, the Grays embody a malignant, supersensible element lurking beneath our fascination with mechanization, revealing the irrational basis of our constricted rationality.  They also have lessons to teach us.  As the critic Lewis Mumford noted, “Our capacity to go beyond the machine rests on our power to assimilate the machine.  Until we have absorbed the lessons of objectivity, impersonality, neutrality, the lessons of the mechanical realm, we cannot go further in our development toward the more richly organic, the more profoundly human.”  Like transhumanist zombies, the Grays embody the reductive perspective that sees everything – matter, genes, human souls – as resources to be used for purposes of control and domination.  In this way, the visitors serve as a warning, as well as an inoculation against a nightmarish fate we can recognize, and reject, in the time that remains to us.

Ian Stevenson … spent 40 years studying young children who spontaneously recall past lives, compiling data from over 2,600 case studies in his massive book, Reincarnation and Biology: A Contribution to the Etiology of Birthmarks and Birth Defects.  He has found numerous incidences in which children recall specific details of their past life, and has documented, in some instances, startling physiological evidence – birthmarks and birth defects – that seem to carry over from their former existence.  In a number of cases, especially ones in which the past life ended in violent death, Stevenson has found, and photographed, highly unusual birthmarks on the children that perfectly match the placement of the mortal wounds that ended their remembered past life.
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The recollection usually commences at a very young age – between two and four – and ends within the next five years.  Stevenson has accompanied some of these children to meet the families, corroborating their specific memories.  “The birthmarks and birth defects in these cases do not lend themselves easily to explanations other than reincarnation,” he notes.  In the cases he has studied, the average period between death and rebirth is fifteen months.

My loss of interest in contemporary culture was only a symptom of a deeper malady – a disavowal of almost everything that had once fascinated or at least entertained me.  Some crisis was announcing itself, a “dark night of the soul” carefully prepared by me history, it seems to me now, though I did not see it that way at the time.  Stalking the all-too-familiar pavement of New York City, I felt I was skating across the thinnest coating of ice, and beneath that slick crust the void was waiting to claim me, to crush me in the impersonal oblivion that had terrified me as a child.  A simple question confronted me – “Is this it?” – and kept intensifying its mocking force, whispering that my life was a lie.

The researcher Allan Brown had been led on a similar trajectory, his obsession with the circles drawing him into the study of sacred geometry.  At the 2003 Glastonbury Conference, Brown presented a talk that was the culmination of his years of research, proposing a solution to a central mystery:  The hidden reason for the “quintuplet” patterns – four smaller circles arrayed around one large one – that had been among the earliest formations recorded, first showing up in 1978, and among the most frequent, appearing every year without fail.  Over time, Brown realized that these quintuplets were related to the ancient conundrum of the squared circle.  Implicit in their relationships, teased out through careful geometric analysis and the drawing of implicit tangent lines, was a series of previously unknown methods for performing this difficult intellectual feat that had obsessed the Classical mind.

 

“The circle is a symbol of spirit, of heaven, of the unmanifest, the immeasurable and the infinite, while the square is the symbol of the material, the Earth, the measurable and the finite,”  Brown said, noting that the symbolic essence of the problem was the reconciliation of seemingly opposing principles, and the resolution of dualities – “a sacred, cosmological act.”  Over twenty-five years, the differently proportioned quintuplets functioned as an instruction manual for the squared circle, suggesting dozens of new methods – some within 99.9999 percent accuracy – for solving this dilemma.  “They were actually teaching a methodology, a complete system, through which a geometric solution to the squaring of the circle could be attempted.”  Brown also proposed that this quarter-century project argued against human hoaxing.  “Can so many formations, over so many years, adhere to such a sublime design principle, without anyone ever, in a quarter of a century, coming forward to hint at the geometric properties they were encoding into their designs?”